We want to expunge those things that unpleasantly impinge on us, of course. But what about impunging those things that expinge?
Or why do we not even have impunge and expinge? Shouldn’t these words exist? We can make a two-by-two table with im and ex on one axis and punge and pinge on the other, and somehow only half the cells are filled with words you’ll find in an English dictionary. What’s up with that?
And, come to think of it, what are pinge and punge anyway?
I’ll start with that last one first. Punge is from Latin pungo ‘I prick, I puncture, I sting’, which gives us puncture and punch and pungent (and even poignant). So on the basis of that you might expect expunge and its Latin source expungo to mean ‘punch out’. But no, it means ‘cross out, strike out’ – or, originally, ‘mark for deletion’: the ancient Romans would mark a name in a list for deletion by pricking holes above or below it. From ‘mark for deletion’ the sense got transferred to the actual act of deletion – and now from ‘delete’ we have moved on to ‘remove’, ‘annihilate’, et cetera (we may compare obliterate, which originally referred to blotting out letters on a page, and is now also used for effacing someone or something from the ledger of existence).
It follows from that that impunge would like mean ‘punch in, puncture, prick’ or perhaps ‘thrust’ or ‘goad’. And in fact it does… if you speak Romanian. Where it’s properly spelled împunge. But in English? I guess we never saw the need for it; we have other words to the same point. The fact that expunge doesn’t obviously relate to puncturing or punching doesn’t help. It might make more sense to make impunge mean ‘enter in’ or ‘force in’ or ‘impose like some kind of prick’.
But, then, we have a word for that last one, too. It’s impinge. Which leads me to pinge. Which comes from Latin pango; strictly, impinge comes from impingo, which is in plus pango plus a change to the root vowel. Impingo means ‘I push against, I force towards, I hit’, et cetera; pango means ‘I drive into, I force into, I fasten, I fix, I set’. It comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘fix, fasten, attach’. It is, literally, riveting.
So what about expinge? There is, in fact, a Latin word expingo. It means ‘I paint, I depict’. How does it mean that? Because it’s not ex plus pango, it’s ex plus pingo ‘I paint’. Could we allow expinge to mean ‘paint, depict’? I guess we could, but why?
So how the heck do you then expinge? Is it that you unfasten? But ex- doesn’t mean the same as un-; it means ‘out, away from’. Expel, for instance, means ‘drive out’, the opposite of impel, ‘drive in’. But ‘attach out’? ‘Fasten out’? Perhaps fix something to a point permanently outside?
Yes, maybe that’s it: if impinge is ‘get up in someone’s business’, then expinge can be ‘stay completely out of the way, out of sight, out of mind’. Which, to this point, expinge has. And there is no need to impunge it into the English language.
Sesquiotica 